Main Internet Counterattack Discussion

The Feminist Frequency bullet in Web Original is messy/horrible in all sorts of ways but the biggest offender has to be the sub-bullet on Goobergrape. Not only is this a topic that TV Tropes is apparently supposed to avoid discussing, but the sub-bullet has all sorts of inaccuracies, for example:

"Aurini then claimed that Anita was lying about her death threats[14]; this was proven wrong by a San Francisco police spokesperson who looked and found that Anita Sarkessian did indeed complain to them about death threats she'd received, numerous times.[15] When proven wrong, Aurini then went from point A to point U by going full conspiracy theory mode, spewing red herrings that this revelation about the FBI didn't answer all of our queries, rendering [Goobergrape] nothing but a tinfoil-hat in neck-beard chic – quite the contrary, it compounded them!" [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini]

The GamerGate story needs to stay off completely. The rest looks like soapboxing, really.

Golden_Flame0

07:04:11 PM Nov 19th 2014

No, I don't think so, as long as the page stays neutral, and discusses both arguments. From what I see, we don't want to be mistaken for either side, considering that there are a fair few people on this website who are pro, anti, and neutral towards Gamer Gate

SeptimusHeap

11:52:16 PM Nov 19th 2014

No, we also don't want to be roped into the argument. Which will invariably happen if we allow the entry to stay on because people have shown repeatedly that they can't restrain themselves.

magicblah

01:01:10 PM Nov 20th 2014edited by 169.233.250.53

I admit that I have a bias when it comes to this sub-bullet, but I think there are some site rules/general cohesiveness attempts that make it particularly not good to have at the moment:

"...you may not use our site to carry out an argument that is going on somewhere else. If the Internet is in an uproar about something, we don't need to tell everyone about it. We most certainly don't want to appear to take someone's side of an argument..."

The Scandalgate entry on Goobergrape is no longer there, so linking to that article is rather pointless

Not checking out the link for the sake of my computer, but the bullet links to ED as evidence and says the link is NSFW. That might be a reference to the advertising on ED—does the forum rule on not linking to sites with explicit advertising apply to the main wiki?

I don't really see anything positive coming of trying to revise this bullet, its presence makes the discussion of Goobergrape on TV Tropes seem acceptable when editors on Scandalgate have stated "G****gate is a banned issue on this site."

I'm also censoring the name of the whenever possible so as to reduce its searchability on the wiki, so sorry if that's confusing.

NarkySawtooth

02:39:53 PM Jan 12th 2015

Why has nothing yet happened in regards to the false information presented on the page that Magicblah pointed out?

SeptimusHeap

01:35:02 AM Jan 13th 2015

Mainly because people here don't sit on the wiki 24/7 hitting refresh, waiting for someone to point something out. I'll answer the query in the edit requests thread.

I've pulled this entry because on top of being too long and detailed, it is about a subject we prefer to not talk about. Also, that sub bullet is completely irrelevant.

A group called the Fine Young Capitalists claimed on soundcloud that Zoe Quinn was using her influence to keep the internet media silent about their Indiegogo campaign to help women get into game design, on the grounds that making women work for free was demeaning (never mind it was for charity). In response 4chan launched #4chan4women and started funding the campaign, leading to the funding shooting up $5,000 in a single day. The group even agreed to let 4chan's logo be displayed on the credits of the game and for a 4chan created character, Vivian "Level" James, to appear in the game. Later, Quinn's ex-boyfriend wrote a lengthy article on Wordpress claiming that she had slept with five guys involved in game journalism (one of whom was married) in order to get positive press for her game Depression Quest. One particular target was Nathan Grayson of Kotaku, a publication also accused of turning a blind eye to the similarly cronyistic relationship between writer Patricia Hernandez and game maker Anna Anthropy a.k.a. auntiepixelantie). A Redditor then alleged that Quinn faked being harassed and doxxednote Internet slang for "posting personally identifiable information" by Wizardchan users, while a Tumblr blogger accused Quinn of exploiting the death of Robin Williams, all for extra publicity. Many responding Redditors and the Tumblr blogger saw their posts being pulled by means of DMCA takedowns, allegedly to prevent further harassment and doxxing, while several gaming journalism sites and YouTube personalities including TotalBiscuit (the poor guy can't seem to get a break, can he?) saw their articles and videos discussing the controversy being taken down. This led to numerous users on Reddit, 4Chan, Tumblr, and Know Your Memeconstantly discussing the topic, demanding more information on what really happened, flooding critical comments onto articles accusing the protesters of misogyny, and organizing a protest outside of PAX 2014. Oh, and all this stuff you just read? That's just the introduction for the shitstorm that followed next! This long chains of events has been named "The Quinnspiracy", aka "GamerGate" (the latter coined by Adam Baldwin to indicate that the scandal goes far beyond just Zoe Quinn herself).

This has led to some positive changes, as The Escapist is working on revising all of their rules from the ground up. While the host wasn't directly involved in the mess, the fact that they manned up and took the initiative shows that some people are willing to listen to the little man.

Golden_Flame0

07:07:36 PM Nov 19th 2014

It needs a re-write, and an examination page. Perhaps along the lines of:

Gamer Gate, one of the bigger scandals to hit the Internet in a while. Analasys page here.

SeptimusHeap

11:50:26 PM Nov 19th 2014

No way we are going to have an examinations page on this subject. TV Tropes does not record random internet controversies.

It's also worth noting that the lock specifically happened because of the argument about that entry.

Sorantheman

08:54:39 AM Sep 19th 2014edited by 90.225.46.41

Actually, about her contact with the FBI, there is something you should know.
It is for the moment not known if it is regarding the possibly fake death threat or the fact that someone had sent child pornography to her through Twitter.
Also, she did claim on Twitter several times that she had contacted the police department about the death threat (being rather inconistent with claims of the police taking her seriously or ignoring her) and not the FBI, wich also made people belive that the death threat was fake considering how once again, the police department had no documented reports of being contacted by her.

From what I've seen a lot of people are okay with it, or at least understanding of why Mojang allowed it.

NonoRobot

12:33:28 AM Sep 17th 2014

I don't see a Internet Counterattack either in that case. At worst people don't buy it when Notch (not Mojang) claims that he didn't do that for the money (2.5 billion dollars? Yeah...), but that's pretty much it. I didn't personaly see an uproar, even on Neo GAF.

Sorantheman

11:35:42 AM Sep 17th 2014

I don't think the controversity has reached THAT level of anger just yet.
Let's wait for a few more months and see where this will go.

** Then, when the final product began arriving, it resurged. Initially, it was only minor—people found out that she was using footage from YouTube playthroughs and Lets Plays without credit, and made their disapproval clear. Then, an artist discovered that Sarkeesian used her artwork in one of her key promotional materials without asking or crediting her. Cue the mass infuriation as neither Sarkeesian nor her defenders would own up to the fact that she had defrauded an artist in an attempt to pursue her own ends, and Sarkeesian tried to weasel her way out of coming under fire over it. She would later apologize for it, but the damage was still done.

If she apologized for it, then this should at least be reworded. At the moment it's making it sound like she's the devil.

I remember a while back a guy from Nintendo of Europe addressing concern about the Wii's low storage space by saying that only geeks and otakus would ever use it all. The backlash was pretty severe and one way or another it got an expansion via SD cards

I can't get edit mode to work on this username and trying to make a new one doesn't work. The process appears successful until I try to click a discussion or edit page, at which point the site acts as though it can't recognize me.

I was going to delete the following entry, since it's an inaccurate depiction of events and what actually happened doesn't fit this trope.

"Dragon Age II was notorious for the huge PR disaster that was part 2011 chain of video game disappointments. But when Bioware ignite the flames by supposedly banning a user for harsh criticism. The game was metacritic bombed to oblivion (downvoting to the same rating that Gamespot gave to Chou Jigen Game Neptune), mocked the moderator who did this and became Bioware's enemy number 1."

What happened was that Dragon Age II bombed and received several negative Metacritic reviews. David Gaider (one of Bioware's lead writers) posted a comment claiming that 4chan was responsible for the constant references to the poor Metacritic scores on the Bioware Social Network (and implying they were responsible for the low Metacritic scores as well). See Gaider's post at http://social.bioware.com/*http:/social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6436625/3 near the top of the page.

"We're well aware of what the 4chan folks are up to and they're desperation to sound more important/numerous than they are. I mean, is there any wonder why multiple people have suddenly been running here going "OMG look at the Metacritic user reviews!" when nobody has ever done that before? Seriously.

Which is too bad, as it certainly makes those with legitimate, constructive criticisms harder to pick out amidst the dross. Be that as it may, we will listen to feedback and come to our own conclusions— it will be all the feedback, however, and not just that provided by those determined to be the loudest and/or most obnoxious."

This claim was posted late at night on March 9, CST, based on the earliest instances I can find of it being quoted on other sites (BSN's own system is not very useful here, since it only states that the post occurred "8 months ago"). No evidence was ever presented to support it, and judging by subsequent threads about it (eg this one: http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/6450160/1), even on the BSN very few posters appeared to buy the story that 4chan was linked to the poor user scores on Metacritic.

In a separate, unrelated event, a BSN forumite posted "Have you sold your souls to the EA devils?", implying that EA's acquisition of Bioware was responsible for many of the commonly-disliked design decisions in Dragon Age II. Stanley Woo, a BSN moderator, banned him - not just from the forums, but from being able to play his legally-purchased copy of Dragon Age II at all. Woo later defended this decision, citing the EA community terms of service (see the picture here: http://imgur.com/VkbXH), but after a day or two in which numerous gaming websites reported on this with much outrage resulting among gamers and consumer rights advocates, EA recanted, claiming a glitch in their system was responsible for the whole mess (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/03/15/dragon-age-2-access-returned-to-banned-forumite/). This was reported on numerous sites starting almost as soon as Woo posted his response, and the earliest timestamp I can find for it is March 10 after 9 AM CST.

To sum up, the actual events aren't as depicted on the trope page and don't seem to actually fit the trope for two reasons: first, the supposed manipulation of Metacritic scores by 4chan was never shown to have actually taken place. Second, the low scores on Metacritic were already present *before* the user was banned.

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